


While the Music Lasts

by cykelops



Category: X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Depression, Healing, M/M, Mentions of past self harm, Multi, Suicidal Thoughts, mentions of past eating disorders
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-11-11
Packaged: 2019-08-11 07:34:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16471424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cykelops/pseuds/cykelops
Summary: Resurrection might as well be a parlor trick for the X-Men. Any mutant worth their salt has one or two runs at the afterlife beneath their belt. Everyone bounces back from the dead, Scott sure did. He has been possessed, brainwashed, and plainly manipulated, but while his body breathes and hungers he has never felt so much unlike himself as he does six months after his rebirth.Logan, alive again just the same, seems to be doing perfectly well. He doesn't spend every day brooding away in a house as far away from the main estate as they would let Scott move. He doesn't look like a ghost made flesh. The circumstances of their resurrection are clearly different, so who is responsible for Scott's life?





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> This one is very different from my usual. It's a reflection of feelings I had when my depression waned and I felt like I had woken up to a world that moved on without me. It made me want to stay oblivious to it, and sometimes it made me want to die. Those feelings were strong and often childish, irrational, and always harmful.   
> If talking about suicide is something that hurts you, I don't recommend reading this one. Overall it is a story about healing, but it has Scott as a narrator, and Scott hates himself and he hates himself through other people's eyes so he is not a reliable one. Logan sees this and he tries to be a good friend, but he is not perfect and he is not the most understanding and emphatic person in the world and it shows. He has his own problems and hurts. This is a story about them learning to be nicer to themselves and to each other.  
> Due to their dynamic, some of their interactions make light of what are very serious feelings. It is not my intent to poke fun or make light of those feelings, but show that Scott and Logan are overly proud and sometimes have little regard for their emotions.   
> This is a very personal piece, so I hope you'll understand I am doing my best to communicate a positive message.

It had been six months, nine days, and counting since Scott Summers had been resurrected.

There was a storm brewing overheard to keep the garden as happy as the first day of spring. It rocked the docked skippers gently, whistling through the boathouse. In the second floor there was a candle lit inside Scott's bedroom right by the window he had closed when it begun to rain. There was a lovely breeze accompanying the storm, but he was very touchy about the hardwood floors. The tiny taps of rain on the glass were enough of a relaxing substitute. 

Every night for an hour before he was meant to go to bed Scott sat down at his desk across his queen-sized bed and logged the day's events in his neat, small print. Writing had become an outlet for all the noise inside his head since childhood. It had been screaming at first, then breaking things with his fists, then with his powers, but as it became more and more dangerous to act out around Winters, Scott was forced to find other ways to set his frustrations free. Journaling met a variety of needs for him— silence, routine, organization, the soothingly repetitive motion of shaping words on a page… It was an opportunity to be more  _ subjective _ about his feelings than he could afford to be throughout most days. He committed the softer parts of himself to pen and paper where they could remain as harmless fiction and not all-too-real weakness.

Scott hadn't had anything  _ soft  _ to share with the page since he had been torn from the cockles of death's embrace and thrust back into the world hateful and bare. 

He was utterly powerless, not in the diplomatically impotent way of his past life, but as a punishment for his rebirth. His eyes were replaced with two red beads on black velvet. No force came from them, concussive or otherwise. He struggled to see so long as the sun was out, nearly sightless under mid-day light. Scott didn’t know who was responsible for his resurrection— he was dropped on the manor steps like the unwanted child he's always been, helpless as a babe— but in the dark of night he took pleasure in imagining a  _ creator,  _ someone who's image he mirrored and who was as flawed, broken, and ugly as he felt, and so incompetent they could not even reanimate a corpse correctly.

Hadn't Scott told dozens of people after the decimation that their powers did not define them? That they were no less important or less  _ mutant?  _ He had. He would do it again. It was the truth, and the truth never mattered when it came to hating himself. 

It wasn't even his first time without his powers, he had lost them so many times before, but only ever long enough to get his hopes up before being completely floored by their return. Now, his world was a desaturated nightmare he could not study too closely or his eyes would dry and sting. 

Scott rubbed his eyelids and slipped the pen into the spiral end of his journal. He had dwelled in enough sorrow to drown his dreams for one night. The clock on the nightstand read 1:30, so he was already an hour and thirty minutes past his bedtime. There would not be a class for him to attend tomorrow, but in the event Headmistress Ororo ever deemed him fit to teach children again it would be good if he already had his sleep schedule in order. 

The little knob on the lamp needed to be turned twice to shut off. The yeti face slippers held loosely as he dragged his feet towards the bed and pulled back the covers. Scott had a hard time keeping warm, and he wore long-sleeved pajamas and fuzzy socks to bed. He tucked himself beneath his weighted sheets and the electrical comforter set to shut off in two hours as to not overheat. He closed his eyes and like every night for the past six months, nine days, and counting, he wished to die in his sleep. 

* * *

The doorknob jimmied, turned, and opened, leaving just enough space to pass through. Steel tipped boots scraped across the hardwood floor. The planks creaked quietly, too afraid to screech beneath the practiced steps. It might have gone completely unnoticed if sleep did not evade Scott so easily. He laid still for six to eight hours and slept for half that on a good night. It was scientific fact that the act of resting was more refreshing than not going to bed altogether, and Scott was a big fan of scientific facts. He laid with his arms crossed over his chest, fingers over his ribs touching tip to tip and listened to the grunting creature lift up onto the bedframe and… hover. 

Scott sighed, counting the tiny tiles on an arbitrary section of the wall while his visitor decided if he was asleep or not. If only he could blame sleep paralysis for the horned figure at the end of his bed. Some demon or beast that would disappear after an instant… No, this was a much bigger nuisance — with an unfortunate haircut. 

“What is it now, Logan?” 

Logan dropped from the frame and made room for himself by pushing Scott's feet aside like a dog spinning in circles before lying down. Scott did not protest the manhandling. The man was now a regular apparition in Scott's room and on his bed. Were he capable of mustering enough energy for it he might have been pushed to frustration by the repeated invasion of his personal space and privacy— But he had no such energy, so Logan's presence roused less of a reaction than rain on his hardwood floors. It was a matter of acknowledging him and hoping he would leave if he got what he wanted.

“Jeannie left today. She said she couldn't find you, but that's a whole lot of bull to me.” Logan tapped the side of his head.

“If you're implying she could have sensed my mind or used Cerebro, you clearly haven't been paying attention.” Scott hummed. At least Logan's visits served as an incentive to chase sleep, because if he was asleep then Logan couldn't come to him for nonsensical arguments. “She can't, because I don't have a soul.” 

His explanation roused a humorless snort.

“You don't believe that. Even I am more spiritual than you. Talkin’ out your ass, all it is.” 

A sour taste filled Scott's mouth. It was not  _ nonsense _ . There was precedent for what he felt in other victims of rebirth. The constant, hollow sensation in his chest, a void that could not be filled by warmth or affection, was similar to that described by Layla Miller's resurrected vessels, or young Mr. Foley's own foray in and out of the afterlife. He might not know who was responsible for his unwanted second chance, but he understood the effect it had had on him. He gave Logan that breakdown, piece by piece so it could pierce through the cracks in his thick skull.

“Do you think I don't have a soul, bub?” Logan asked critically. He chewed on his cheek in place of the tobacco he habitually enjoyed but had been trying to quit since— Well, since his return, because Logan and Scott's encores had come only a few months apart. “Think Jeannie doesn't?”

“I think I have a condition present in some but not all victims of resurrection.” Scott snapped. “I think I am no longer myself and I never will be. I would be better off being farmed for my organs than haunting the remains of a boathouse we used to stick the  _ unsightly  _ X-Men in.” He dragged the covers over his shoulders and adjusted the knobs on the electric comforter, feeling weirdly hot for so early in the night.

“You and Jean have always been good at healing.”  Scott said quietly. He flexed his fingers into a fist to stretch all the little scars on his knuckles into vibrant white lines. “Not me.”

“The four and a half girlfriends you've had every time Jeannie dies begs to differ.” Logan joked maliciously. “Now that's what I call healing.” 

That fu— Scott threw his covers back and sat up with a snarl. He reached for his visor and… nothing. The tips of his fingers touched the curve of his temple. He didn't need the visor anymore. There was nothing left for them to hold back. No power. No power…

“ _ Victims _ , he says. What a riot.” Logan continued, ignoring Scott's outburst or not caring for it. “Get dressed, yeah? Jeannie's gone and 'Ro with her. In their eternal wisdom they left an amnesiac and a depressed fatalist to chaperone an honest-to-god hiking field trip to some swamp park.”

“Hope you and Hank have fun.” Scott said dryly and kissed the pillow before Logan could drag him off the bed by force. He kicked him in the chest hard; a lucky thing for Logan that he had missed his real target. “I already told Ororo, Logan. If I am not fit to teach a class, then I am not fit to watch the kids!”

Logan was and had always been physically stronger than Scott. Fighting half-assed against two tons of solid adamantium, beer, and expletives was futile. He dragged him onto the rug to crush his slippers, sheets and all, and Scott was disappointed when he didn't brain him on the nightstand by accident.

“Quit your whining. We all gotta babysit before we can play role model. I know you can stop thirty brats from drowning in a crocodile nest at the very fucking  _ least _ .” 

Scott lifted his chest off the ground and raised his head face to face with the full-length mirror beside his bed. He had not trimmed his hair for months and it was long enough to brush his stubble. He touched the thin violet lines crazing his face, flushed little veins that had darkened in Scott's anger towards his guest. With his legs tangled in the sheets, the sick pallor of his face and sunken eyes, he was reminded of sirens— real sirens, the ones that sang and played and ate men's heads in a single bite of their unhinged mouths. 

Logan saw it too, it was in the way his mouth took a downturn when he was forced to look at Scott too closely. He couldn't even meet his eyes. Scott did not blame him for not wanting to. It was one thing for his call sign to be a monster of legend and another to  _ be  _ a monster. He was aware of the hypocrisy involved in preaching body positivity to teenagers and hating his own form, but his young charges with physical mutations were never more beautiful than when they were their true selves. This was not Scott's true self. This was a warped shadow, a doll scrubbed clean of its factory polish and repainted by unskilled hands. He didn't blame Jean or Ororo for their unwillingness to meet his eyes either.

It wasn't really that Scott hated the way he looked now, it was simply that it was the easiest thing to hate.  _ Dysphoria _ was an old friend, and a symptom of a more complex network of problems he would rather not name. 

He thought that Logan of all people would understand what Scott really wanted from his second chance: a swift end. He had gone to him a week after he had been pushed onto the world. He had said the goodbyes. He was done, good and ready. No regrets. Scott asked him to make it quick. Six months later, they had not revisited that conversation since Logan had threatened to cut out his tongue if he ever said anything like that again.

But Logan had been freshly resurrected himself, maybe he had seen Scott's wish as a threat to his own life, maybe he didn't feel like dealing with the period of staged mourning they were all compelled to posture for. Things were different now. Scott was barely liked and had been fading for weeks. Maybe now Logan would listen. 

“You trusted me with Muramasa's blade… You trusted me to kill you if you were ever not yourself. But you won't do the same for me. Why won't you do the same for me?” Scott said accusingly. 

Logan cocked his head, hawk-like. His eyes were heavy with boredom, expression unphased by the question, as though he had been expecting it and it could not surprise him. He crouched close to the ground, close enough to touch but choosing to keep his arms across his lap, close enough to look at him and instead fixing on a point on the window. 

“I trust you with a lot of things, Scott. Strategy, diplomacy, math.” A chuckle shook his shoulders. “But never to know how you feel.” 

Logan's showed his teeth in a half grin. His left canine threw the symmetry of his face slightly. It was one of those things that always drew Scott's eye.

“Overthinking shit, pushing everybody away, looking for a sword to throw yourself on cause it's easier to be a martyr than a good little soldier… That's same old Scott to me.” 

The heat spread across Scott's face. Distaste pinched his lips and the space around his eyes. Logan was crass, stupid, and his observations were as reliable and on the mark as a chicken who could predict lottery numbers. He liked making Scott angry because angry was the only thing anyone could make him these days other than pathetically self-pitying. He didn't want that to be who he was. He would rather die than feel  _ this  _ for the rest of his days. 

Logan walked across the room to retrieve Scott's leather jacket from the coat hanger. He threw it on the floor in front of Scott's face. 

“Now, get dressed. World doesn't stop cause you want it to.”


	2. there is such a thing as quiet

Stuffing thirty students into the more passenger friendly school jet was actually more stressful and time-consuming than Logan's devil-may-care attitude made it out to be. Scott had to check--and double check-- that every student had packed for the trip. They would be camping in the forest for a few days and that required gear, clothes, snacks, and, in some special cases, medicine. Thankfully no triple checks were necessary as Jubilee--God bless her maternal instincts-- had risen to the opportunity to help. Scott forgot sometimes how mature she had become after her childhood had been stolen, a milestone more definitively mutant than the X-gene. 

Jubilee was not the only teacher joining them. Kitty was taking over Headmistress duties while Ororo was away, and she had sent them Illyana, Rachel, Rogue, and Laura. It only cemented in him the belief that this trip was a test. Smart, honest X-Men, half of which Scott did not think answered to Kitty to begin with and had definitely volunteered to keep an eye on them. Illyana and Rachel for Scott, Rogue and Laura for Logan. And Jubilee… with the unpredictability of her power's return he got the idea she was another headache the field leaders were trying to keep under wraps. It's what Scott would have done if he was still in charge. 

The kids seem excited to attend, and the older, (but not much older) teacher assistants were good at keeping the peace between cliques that were more receptive to peer intervention than if Logan or Scott got involved, even if those peers were the likes of Julian Keller and Quentin Quire. It was vaguely amusing to watch Julian wrangle the kind of upstart teens he was once exactly like. There were a lot of faces Scott knew only in passing, as he had been avoiding the mansion as much as he possibly could. The only names that clicked were of the sleepless few that let him in through the kitchen door when he was looking for a midnight snack. 

He was not in charge of the operation-- no, the trip, this wasn't a mission-- but Rachel insisted he shadow her. She was trying to make him feel useful, but it was her who packed his favorite lunch and made sure he had enough jackets to keep warm. Like a child. He was an embarrassment, but he could stand quietly beside her if that's what she wanted. 

“Dad?” Rachel's red fingernails dipped the clipboard in his hands. “Are you alright?”

He counted the kids as they boarded for her and reread the list with what bordered as obsessive. He had to remember that these loud, boisterous, smiling teenagers were so, so easy to lose. The turnover rates for mutant teens skyrocketed whenever there was something remotely happy for them in the horizon. 

“I'm alright, sweetheart.” He lied. 

“That was the last of them.” Rachel looked over her shoulder. The sun burned in her hair and brought Scott pangs of grief and relief that washed over like waves on the shore. “You can get on next. Illyana and I will prep the jet. Just make sure the kids are strapped in.”

Scott hesitated to move even after Rachel put her hand softly between his shoulder blades. He knew rationally that he was in no condition to pilot a plane, and yet he couldn't remember the last time he had been in one and… not. 

He walked row by row. Sit down. Buckle in. So simple even a child could do it. Sit down, buckle in. Don't consider the twenty, thirty, forty ways things could go wrong before they even took off. Don't--

“Don't get green on me, Scott. Being sick on planes is  _ my  _ thing.” 

Logan's inopportune timing jerked Scott out of the soft mumbling mantra of  _ sit down, buckle in.  _ He took the seat to his left and buckled his seatbelt before his body even touched the cushion. To make matters worse, he dug around Scott's lap to buckle his seatbelt too. Logan gripped their shared armrest with enough force to debt it. The stiff angle at which he sat held his whole body flat as a plank against his chair. To say Logan hated flying would be a gross understatement.

“Close the curtains, would you?” 

Scott and Logan's chairs, which bore the numbers thirty five and thirty six in little steel labels above the head rest, were specially assigned by Rachel. She had been kind enough to take them aside and tell them they were to remain in the back for the duration of the flight, but Scott would not have been bothered by a more public humiliation. It was bad enough to share it with Logan.

“Rachel said we had to watch the kids.” Scott rebuked. Their seats usually served as a private nook away from the heart of the plane but it had a view, albeit obstructed, to the aisle where the children sat.

“We both know that was to keep our sorry asses busy.” Logan pat his chest until he found a pack of old chewing gum in the breast pocket of his flannel shirt. Scott turned down the offered, half melted piece. The green wad stuck to his front teeth before he chewed it through. “Close it.” 

Scott complied only because the less Logan was reminded he was inside a plane about to take off, the more pleasant this would be for the both of them. Logan nodded and closed the window. There was nothing about him that implied he was more comfortable with the window closed and the curtains drawn. In fact, he looked painfully miserable. Worrying, even.

Logan usually sat two rows behind Scott when they were inside the Blackbird, Scott had never gotten to look at his fear up close. Jeers and laughter at the man's expense he had heard, but no words of comfort. Had anyone ever asked him if he was alright? Had they taken that hand wound so tightly around the armrest and stroked his knuckles until his chest felt lighter? 

“Logan…”

“Yeah?” Logan asked impatiently.

It was not likely anyone ever had. Calluses branded Scott's worn hands, his touch would be as grating as his nasal voice. He struck it from his mind and focused his eyes on the curtains to study their thread count, size, and material while the plane took off. 

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

* * *

Among Scott's wreckage of problems was a remarkable dearth in his endeavor to exist from the psychological and physical poles of his world. The body was a reflection of the mind, and Scott's mind was a mess. He had a thimble-sized appetite, which caused a not insubstantial loss of his muscle mass as his body resorted to self-consumption when he could not force any more down the gullet. 

Rachel had packed a dainty slice of tiramisu cheesecake alongside the nuts, cheese, and carrots that made up his lunch. So far he had managed to keep the nuts and the cheese from coming back up-- and they had tried. If he didn't eat the cheesecake, Rachel would know and she would be worried. Tiramisu was his favorite flavor. She had once watched him eat an entire belly-busting plate of pasta and still chase it with dessert because he couldn't pass up a slice of tiramisu cheesecake. Like a flap of a butterfly's wings, failing to put this cheesecake in his mouth would have her breathing down his neck about depression doing away with appetite, and she would bring up the therapist. He didn't want to talk about the therapist again.

“Every time I look at you it gets worse.” 

No, Scott didn't need another shadow, because he already had Logan. So concerned for his mental health and still trying his patience by eating from his share of nuts and cheese. The man was  _ allergic  _ to nuts. If one looked closely enough, they could almost catch his healing factor working overtime to fight his body's reaction to the proteins. 

“Then stop looking at me.” 

There was so much to look at in this nook of the forest and Logan still chose to stare head on, making petty comments about Scott's supposed eyebrow dandruff or chapped lips, both which he chalked up to a abandonment issues or-- whatever. Scott had stopped listening. 

The sun favored the colors of the grass beneath them. It was fresh, green, and just on the side of wet when Scott curled his fingers into the dirt. Undisturbed patches of red and yellow flowers followed the will of the breeze, coddled by the buzzing bees. Pollen was one of Scott's worst allergies, like nuts for Logan, but ever since he had been resurrected it hadn't really bothered him at all. Props to his maker. 

“We ever gonna go back to the rest of the group?” Logan cocked his head towards the fading sounds of children returning to camp. According to the schedule they would wait out their food and head down to the river for a dip and a lesson on sweetwater ecosystems. Rachel had packed a melon-shaped floatie he had bought her for her birthday. 

“I don't feel much like swimming.”

Being that close to nakedness would only accentuate all the color drain in him that not even the sunshine could tan. Plenty of shade overlooked the river but the shine of the sun hitting off the water would nonetheless irritate his sensitive eyes. No, he was best passing on the opportunity. The girls had it under control. 

Logan twisted on his cross legged stance to corral Scott between his arms. To little effect. Scott wasn't going anywhere. He had the sun, so much Vitamin D, the grass, and silence-- because Logan blowing hot air in his face was as good as nothing.

“Only reason Rachel's letting you be is that you got  _ me  _ to chaperone. You like that, you like your kid treating you like one?” 

Perhaps Logan's jab would have packed more of a punch if it didn't perfectly align with the berating Scott already delivered on himself. So, he was a burden on everyone in his life; stale news. 

“I don't care one way or the other.” Scott shrugged.

Logan popped open another bottle of Corona, or Heineken, or some other bootlegged brand with the labels poorly sawed off. It tasted like piss. Scott hated beer. He had drunk at least two from the six pack. It had a satisfying burn that went down suspiciously hard for beer. 

His friend wasn't always so cross with this version of him, but Logan had spent months trying to be gentle, which was not his nature outside treating fuzzy forest animals with affection. Deer didn't bitch back at him to figure himself out before flapping his mouth at them. Not quite like Scott had. Bunnies didn't race through the underbrush screaming that Logan should be jumping at the chance to get with his wife, though those circumstances were so old and so overwritten by Logan and Ororo's relationship as to be insulting to people beyond the burly man. Scott wasn't proud of it.

Logan laid down on the picnic blanket with his legs bent at the knee after tipping half the content of the bottle into his throat. In place of the frustration that buffered their usual back and forth was a soft sense of wandering. A thoughtfulness. 

“What do you say to someone who doesn't want to live? I feel like you would have known the answer to that.” 

Scott was twelve when he dragged his nails hard down his wrists hoping they would bleed. He was thirteen when he started spacing out his meals until it was one every three days. Fourteen when he made a deal with himself that if he made it to twenty-four and had nothing worth living for, then he could rest. He was seventeen when he had six people and a dream. Then there were more. Twelve, twenty-six, thirty-eight things worth living for. Scott almost forgot about the deal, until the morning after his twenty-fourth birthday when Jean hugged him in their bed and sobbed, relieved. 

Winters taught him how to lie down and take the beatings curled around his vital organs. The aftermath showed him all the ways his body lied to survive-- how  _ shock  _ makes it so after a while there is no pain, and time makes the bruises fade. Xavier taught him how to lie to his friends, his wife, telepaths, and himself. To survive. Always to survive. Scott was desperate and hungry to live... Most of the time.

It would be easy to lie, tell Logan there was nothing he could do, Scott had made his peace with death a long time ago. 

But there were things Scott lived for still, though his darkest thoughts frequently obscured them. The warmth of the sun, the soft grass, the wind carrying laughter to the meadow from the river, and Logan laying beside him with his face towards the sky, looking freshly groomed, tanned, and alive but most of all: concerned. For his friend. For Scott.

“You're here, Logan. That's all you can do. Be here and wait.”

He laid down close to his companion, shoulders touching, and ignored his furrowed brow, wrinkled like puzzle pieces unwilling to connect. Logan's borrowed hat served to blot out the sun from Scott’s eyes and translate it to a soft, brown glow beneath its brim. 

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed it! And that it didn't make you too sad.


End file.
